AHMED GHAILANI

Ghailani.

Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani (profile) is accused of involvement in the US embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998, which killed more than 200 people.

Reportedly, the US Ambassadors to Kenya and Tanzania were absent from their embassies on the days of the attacks.

None of the security cameras at the embassies were filming at the times of the attacks. (US & Mossad inspired terrorism in Tanzania, Kenya.)

At least some of the evidence against Ghilani would appear to have been obtained through torture. (US judge nixes star government witness in terror trial.)

According to the prosecutors, the United States "justifiably opted to initially treat the defendant as an intelligence asset". (Law.com - Embassy Prosecution)

Ghailani was born in Zanzibar in Tanzania.

At one time he was a Muslim travelling preacher.

He visited a number of countries including Pakistan. (Ahmed Ghailani - Wikipedia)

He was arrested in Pakistan in July 2004 and handed over to the US at the beginning of 2005.

He spent time in a secret CIA prison before being sent to Guantanamo in Cuba.

He is the first Guantanamo detainee to go on trial in a civilian court in the US.

According to a transcript of a closed-door hearing in March 2007, he has admitted delivering material which came to be used to blow up the US embassy in Tanzania in 1998. (Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani profile)

He said he did not know about the attack beforehand.

He is accused of buying the truck that carried the bomb used in the Dar es Salaam attack. (Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani profile)

He is also said to have escorted the bomb maker between Dar es Salaam and the Kenyan city of Mombasa after the bomb was made as well as scouting the US embassy.

According to the US transcript, he admitted visiting an al-Qaeda/CIA training camp in Afghanistan after the bombings.

He was reported to have been in the Liberian capital, Monrovia, in 2001, with another suspect in the embassy bombings, a Kenyan man Fazul Abdullah Mohammed. (Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani profile)

The UK's Observer newspaper (Bin Laden's $20m African 'blood diamond' deals.) reported in 2002 that the two men allegedly ran an al-Qaeda/CIA financing operation, trading "blood diamonds".

Reportedly, Ghailani and Mohammed were lavishing money on women and alcohol.

Liberia was run by Charles Taylor who was said to be a friend of the CIA and a friend of al Qaeda.

According to the Boston Globe correspondent Bryan Bender: "Al Qaeda allegedly paid Taylor for protection and then joined him in the African diamond trade, raising millions of dollars for terrorist activities, according to UN war crimes documents."

Alex Yearsley of Global Witness asserts that, "Taylor received CIA payments until January 2001."

According to The Financial Times: "Alex Yearsley, of London-based Global Witness, alleges that the CIA and FBI long had tried to publicly minimize links between conflict diamonds and Islamic militant groups, including al-Qaida.

"The U.S. security agents feared exposure of their own longtime links with Charles Taylor, the ousted Liberian leader who played a main role in West Africa's insurgencies and blood diamond trade, Yearsley said. Taylor received CIA payments until January 2001, Yearsley claimed in a telephone interview."

allAfrica.com tells us more about the al Qaeda Connection.

Liberia under Charles Taylor was "a criminal and terrorist Disneyland ...Taylor had allowed in Victor Bout, the largest illegal weapons merchant in the world. He had allowed in Leonid Menin, a very large Ukrainian drug trafficker. He allowed in South African and Balkan organized crime."

In May 2003, the FBI named Ghailani as a suspect in a planned al-Qaeda plot; he was arrested in 2004.

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